Today is Economic Warning Day 29.01.2025

It's not really my thing to go to Berlin's Brandenburg Gate or Stuttgart's Schloßplatz today to demonstrate. I also don't have a company wall on which I can record protests on a video recorder. We used to do that during my student days in Stuttgart with films that weren't quite suitable for young people and we had a lot of fun with it. I just decided to write a blog article on the subject of Economic Warning Day 2025.

In the depths of my heart, I am an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur is a full-time job that involves the scope of several degree programs. Business economist, lawyer, engineer, marketing specialist, HR specialist, visionary and everything else. You can only reconcile all of this if you stick to basic principles.

A basic principle in the area of finance is that income must be greater than expenditure.

One that rewards performance and penalizes non-performance.

That I only want employees who are capable and responsible and create added value for the company, not those who work to rule and can't even order toilet paper on their own.

That customers are served quickly and in a friendly manner and feel that they are in good hands with us.

That we always look at how we can make our administrative processes faster and simpler.

That we deliver what we promise and go the extra mile.

That we, from the cleaning lady to the company boss, stick to our own rules that we have agreed to.

That we tackle the things that, according to Pareto, bring 80% of success and only require 20% effort.

That everyone can speak freely on any topic and can also have different opinions.

That we don't procrastinate perfectly, but that we complete projects quickly and our customers are 100% satisfied with us.

What unites us is the common image of a unique, awesome company where everyone is highly professional, has fun together, the customers are very satisfied and last but not least, which is highly profitable.

Staff, some of whom have no training, have no overarching plan but follow some kind of ideology, distribute other people's money to people who have never contributed to this system, don't stick to their own rules, think they can outwit physics, don't stand by their own statements, don't remember their own mistakes, try to sit everything out, tries to regulate everything down to the smallest detail, hires more and more people who invent more and more new regulations to solve more and more small-scale problems, thinks linearly instead of looking at interactions, orders products worth billions by text message and then absolves itself and has apparently never heard of Pareto... .

They forcefully collect money from everyone, whether they are interested in the offer or not, only fulfill their mission to expose critical grievances when it doesn't affect their own clientele, cuddle up to politicians, question everything that doesn't fit into their own ideological world view, think that entrepreneurs are the bad guys (keyword Tatort), destroy the German language, have probably completely forgotten dialectics...

I just can't get my head around these different worlds, as they seem to be diametrically opposed.

Before you reach for your pen in a rage and launch a final counter-attack, and then launch a shitstorm at me, pause for a moment.

The situation is very serious. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake, even if you are doing well at the moment and think that things are not so bad and will continue as before. I see massive job cuts at a large number of our customers, production being relocated abroad and a dramatic increase in insolvencies. The infrastructure in Germany has deteriorated and we have turned from an energy exporting country into an importing country.

If we are smart, we will change something about it, and we will do so on the same scale as the problem comes to us. You don't put out a forest fire with a mocha cup. After all, we are all in the same boat and blaming only the others means making yourself a victim. And who wants to be a victim?

Let's think about what an entrepreneur would do if a company was hurtling towards insolvency, and let's act accordingly and responsibly.

Our common prosperity depends on it. After all, we (almost?) all want to leave our children a better world than we found when we entered it.

We need experienced people at the top of politics who can also implement the necessary things, not dilettantes.

The most important points:

• Less bureaucracy
• Competitive tax rates
• Competitive energy prices

We can also take our cue from what the last real chancellor of the CDU 😉😉😉, Gerhard Schröder, did in a similar situation:

• Promote personal responsibility: Making people more responsible for actively looking for work themselves and continuing their education.
• Create flexibility: Make the labor market more dynamic by reducing regulation.
• Encourage and challenge: Offer support measures (promotion), but also set clear expectations for personal initiative (demanding).
• Increase competitiveness: Reduce taxes and costs for companies in order to increase international competitiveness.
• Modernize the welfare state: Reforms aimed at adapting social security systems to demographic and economic challenges.

Only when the economy has the feeling that it is welcome in Germany and finds better conditions for doing business will the economic curve point upwards again. Only then will we be able to maintain our welfare state - certainly only in a slimmed-down form - and be perceived and taken seriously again in terms of foreign policy due to our economic strength in a massively changing world.

We do not have a knowledge problem, but an implementation problem. Let's work together to find solutions.

And let's finally start treating each other objectively, sensibly and respectfully, which also means accepting the opinions of others and exchanging ideas in an open and critical manner: for the competition of the best ideas. This applies to the economy just as much as it does to a functioning democracy.

PS: Writing is therapeutic, at least for me 😁

PPS: Next time I'll surprise you again with a newsletter about the simulation.

PPPS: Did I already tell you that my urinal video is going viral? Maybe that will solve one of the big problems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcoJF7Zwl30